Skip to main content

#RPGaDay2018 Day 9: How has a game surprised you?

Nearly every game I've ever played has surprised me in one way or another. This is separate and explicitly apart from moments where players or showrunners surprised me; I'm just talking about the point when a mechanic really clicked or an unexpected synergy allowed me to be enlightened about something (note: this is not always a good thing).

Like, the moment I realized that the body/stun mechanic for Champions could be used to replicate a "success with bonus/success with penalty/failure with bonus/failure with penalty" result set.

Or the point during play one session when I feel like I suddenly fundamentally understood the idea of FAE's Approaches and how they're different from Fate's Skills on a fundamental level.

Or that day when I went crazy and hacked FAE, Apocalypse World, and Exalted into a sorta-game to see if I understood the idea of what that looked like.

I have stories like this about nearly every game I've ever played. Like the moment during a 4E game when I realized I hate flat dice curves (I've told this story before elsewhere).

Games surprise me when they bring the background into the foreground, for good or ill, and I hope they keep doing that.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Organizing And You: Lessons from Labor History

    I made a joke on Twitter a while ago: Do I need to post the Thomas M Comeau Organizing Principles again? https://t.co/QQIrJ9Sd3i — Jerome Comeau says Defund The Police (@Heronymus) July 15, 2021 and it recently came back up because a member of my family got their first union job and was like "every job should be offering these sorts of benefits" and so I went ahead and wrote down what I remember of what my dad told me. My father had many jobs, but his profession was basically a labor union organizer, and he talked a lot about the bedrock foundation items needed to be serious about organizing collective action. Here's what I remember.    The Thomas M. Comeau Principles of Organizing -- a fundamental list for finding and building worker solidarity from 50 years of Union Involvement. This list is not ranked; all of the principles stated herein are coequal in their importance. Numbering is a rhetorical choice, not a valuation. 1) Be good at your job. Even in...

#RPGaDay 2018 Day 19: What music enhances your game?

Again, this really depends on the game and whether or not I'm playing or running or what have you. The RIFTS game I just storyran leaned heavily on Tell That Devil by Jill Andrews and Neko Case's Hold On, Hold On  for mood and setting. Sometimes, I think about themes for my characters. I had a dwarven knight that used to ride around humming Shostakovich's 5th . And there's a good chance that my newest character will hum chiptunes to themselves, since they're a robot.

#RPGaDay 2017 -- Day 18

Which RPG have you played the most in your life? If you count all the editions of D&D as one RPG, then the answer is D&D. I never was serious about 1st or 2nd Ed., but I was part of a 3E playtest group, and I started a 4E campaign basically as soon as I could. If you don't count all of the D&D editions as one, then the answer is HERO system, specifically Champions 4th Ed, the Big Blue Book. I was part of a group that played with the BBB for quite a while, through two multi-year campaigns. I have to admit, there is something rather satisfying about chucking great fistfuls of d6s across the battlemat and being able to figure out the body damage basically instantly. After that, I think it's GURPS, and then after that would be Pathfinder, and then 4E. I've dabbled so much with so many systems that the long-term campaigns basically swamp everything else.